Sunday, 18 March 2012

All at sea

I've been enjoying the BBC4 series, All at Sea, in which Timothy Spall and his wife Shane travel round the coast of Britain in a barge at a leisurely pace (it took them six years). It reminded me of a line from Jonathan Raban's book Coasting that ‘even the most household corridor of sea is a very wild place indeed’. Raban did a similar circumnavigation of the island in the early 1980s and wrote this book about it. Here is another quote from it that I just dug out:

‘People on the land think of the sea as a void, an emptiness, haunted by mythological hazards. The sea marks the end of things. It is where life stops and the unknown begins. It is a necessary, comforting fiction to conceive of the sea as the residence of gods and monsters – Aeolus, the Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis, the Goodwins, the Bermuda Triangle. In fact the sea is just an alternative known world. Its topography is as intricate as that of the land, its place names as particular and evocative, tis maps and signposts rather more reliable.’

About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
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